In the tragic shooting which left several people, including a nine-year-old child and federal judge, dead, and which left a member of Congress severely wounded and in the hospital, the question looms: what motivated the assassin? The shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, clearly has extreme mental health problems. In search through the remains of his life, several items shed light on his potential motives.
Obsessed with politics and the Internet expression thereof, we find that he read various websites, including the Daily Kos, a notorious hate-filled site which regularly demonizes political leaders who fail to embrace its left-wing views. The Daily Kos wrote that Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the target of Loughner's attack, had a "bull's eye" on her because she has spoken against the liberal elements in her party. Loughner was encouraged by such violent language and began plotting to assassinate her.
The Daily Kos went on to tell its readers that Gabrielle Giffords should be "targeted" in the elections because she was not embracing the left-wing agenda favored by Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Daily Kos.
Naturally, a reader in good mental health reads the violent rhetoric as merely metaphorical, and does not take words like "target" and "bull's eye" literally. But the hate speech of the Daily Kos has a different effect on those who are already in the grip of mental illness.
Loughner, a self-proclaimed fan of Karl Marx, in his delusional state, took the left-wing rants literally. In a free society, we cannot ask the media to censor itself merely because some insane individual will use words or phrases as a pretext for violence: no, we affirm the freedom of the press. But the freedom of the press also allows us to see the Daily Kos and Markos Moulitsas for what they are: merchants of hate and violence.
